April 08, 2010

Yesterday, I wrote on the subject of Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell's proclamation of "Confederate History Month" and the misuse of history.

In response, the Governor's office issued a statement noting that "a major omission" in the original proclamation. That oversight?

That there were actual slaves in Virginia in 1861. And that they might not have been very happy about being forced to support an illegal government in rebellion against the United States. Yes, believe it or not, there were SLAVES in Virginia, and they JUST MIGHT have had something to do with "a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse."

Governor, you need to fix this proclamation...FAST. The damage has already been done to some extent; the NAACP and other civil rights organizations have already come out in protest to this planned celebration of all things Confederate. You've taken the first step by recognizing "...that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders."

Take the next step. Recognize the valor, sacrifice and patriotism of UNION soldiers, black and white, from Virginia. Recognize the fact that they--not the poor misguided victims thrown away by the Confederacy at Antietam, Gettysburg and the numerous battlefields in Virginia for some amorphous mixture of "states rights" and human bondage, sprinkled with a heavy dose of racism--were the true Virginian heroes of the Civil War. They stood by the Old Flag when their fellow Virginians went mad. They watched their homes and families scattered by bands of Rebel guerrillas and the Confederate government. Recognize the fact, that in the end, they returned home the victors but watched their victory be reviled by their neighbors, hated in their old age, and forgotten by their grandchildren.

Lastly, recognize, on the same level as the Confederate 'gods' Jackson and Lee, General George Henry Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga, whose grave now lies in the loyal soil of Troy, New York. Whose loyal and patriotic service to the United States of America resulted, even in death, his banishment from his native Virginia. His service in Reconstruction should be recalled as well, as he led the suppression of the Ku Klux Klan, jailed local leaders who denied Constitutional rights of freed slaves and did all within his power--to include the use of military force--to uphold the rights of African-Americans and loyal white Unionists against the resurgence of racism and violence after the war.

Do the right thing Governor. Recall the proclamation. Reissue it as "Civil War History Month." Recognize all Virginians--not just white male secessionists--for whom the Civil War was the great crisis of their lives and left all Americans with issues that are still being addressed today. Use the month as an opportunity to discuss the hard questions of racism, war, and Federal vs. local government.

April 07, 2010

I opened this morning's Washington Post to find that the governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, has determined that the state's tourism demands requires a renewal of "Confederate History Month," which has lain dormant for the past eight years.

Ok, I get it. The state needs money and the Civil War is a big draw--from hotels to gas stations to trinkets bought at the battlefield park gift shops. It should be a big draw for the state. Every American should spend at least a day in their lives standing on the slopes of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and think about how a handful of loggers and lobstermen from Maine, led by a college professor, saved the Republic on a hot summer's day in 1863. Or in the remains of the trenches at Petersburg, Virginia, imagining the brutality of war, as fifteen and fifty year old men lived, fought and died in muddy holes in the ground.

However, to proclaim a special month for the bloody secession movement that killed 650,000 Americans, that kept African-Americans in bondage, and whose 'beloved memory' prevented any meaningful civil rights changes from taking place for another 100 years, is wrongheaded and just plain historically incorrect. I've defended, on this blog, what has seemed to be pro-Confederate speeches and writings from political leaders and others. In those cases, I defended their right to say what they believe, and to hopefully help others to understand why those men died and to aid in ensuring that such good soldiers should never die in such a bad cause again.

Let's start with what the problems are with Virginia's "Confederate History Month."

First, it ignores the 490,865 African-Americans who were slaves in 1860 Virginia, and whose Confederate heritage was the lash, servitude, and a century of virtual slavery after 1865. Add to this the 58,042 freed slaves who resided in Virginia as well. Were they happy with their lot? Did they take to the streets and cheer when the slave-owning aristocrats, putting the mantle of states' rights and the Revolution over their illegal act, forced the state out of the Union? I do not believe so.

Secondly, it ignores the historical fact that a large portion of Virginia itself was so opposed to slavery and to rebellion that it broke away and formed its own loyal state--West Virginia. Did such overwhelming love for Jefferson Davis fill the hearts of every white man in the Old Dominion? Not in the least; 376,688 white Virginians seceded instead of giving into the demands of the slaveholders for poor white hillbillies to honorably die to protect their 'property.'

Lastly, it ignores the historical fact that thousands of white Virginians fought for the UNION. From Union General George H. Thomas, the "Rock of Chickamauga" and a great hero of the conflict, to loyalists who filled the ranks of West Virginian and Virginian Federal volunteer regiments to those who joined the volunteer regiments of other states; these men have all been systematically ignored and historically forgotten by the Lost Cause myth-makers that have occupied the Virginia state house since the end of Reconstruction. Belittled as traitors or scalawags, they stayed loyal to their nation. While most were not abolitionists, they were Union men and did not believe in fighting "the rich man's war" launched by the slaveocrats in 1861.

If Governor McDonnell wants to promote the Civil War in Virginia, I say more power to him. Let him call it "Civil War Heritage Month" and encourage the study of not just Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee, but George Thomas, the tens of thousands of white and black Union volunteers from Virginia, and let it address the plight of the slaves, the problems of the free black population, and the atrocity of post-Reconstruction civil rights violations in Virginia.

History is not a pretty thing Governor. But perhaps we will learn more by confronting the ghosts of our past than making them gods.

February 10, 2010

They are giants of medicine, pioneers of the care that women receive
during childbirth and were the founding fathers of obstetrics. The
names of William Hunter and William Smellie still inspire respect among
today's doctors, more than 250 years since they made their
contributions to healthcare. Such were the duo's reputations as
outstanding physicians that the clienteles of their private practices
included the rich and famous of mid-18th-century London.

But were they also serial killers? New research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM)
claims that they were. A detailed historical study accuses the doctors
of soliciting the killing of dozens of women, many in the latter stages
of pregnancy, to dissect their corpses. [Guardian]

This
story has all the makings of an anti-science urban legend. Regardless
of the quality of the underlying research, this story is going to get
embellished in the retelling and used to bash scientific medicine. So, it seems important to refocus the debate on the facts as quickly as possible. The
allegations are already being mentioned in the same breath as
documented atrocities like the Tuskegee syphilis study, and Dr. Joseph
Mengele's infamous concentration camp experiments.

I checked
out Don C. Shelton's original paper. It's a very good read. Shelton
raises interesting questions about exactly where these two doctors got their
anatomical specimens. He shamelessly overstates his case, however.
Shelton flatly asserts that Hunter and Smellie were "responsible" for
the murders of more women than Jack the Ripper.

The subjects of Smellie and Hunter's anatomy books were women who died in childbirth, or during their
final month of pregnancy. Shelton's argument is that there simply
weren't enough heavily pregnant and birthing women dying of natural
causes in mid-18th-century London to account for the thirty-plus
cadavers that Smellie and Hunter examined to write their respective
anatomical classics.

Based on a review of their atlases,
Shelton says that the two anatomists came up with a total of 20
cadavers between 1750 and 1754; and that Hunter somehow located another
dozen between 1766 and 1774. That works out to four or five such bodies
a year for the first stretch and fewer than two a year for the second
period.

Shelton concludes that the doctors must have had these women murdered-to-order, a practice known as burking. The term burking
is an allusion to the murderers Burke and Hare who smothered their
victims in Edinburgh between 1837 and 1838 and delivered them to Dr.
Robert Knox, a private anatomy lecturer. Shelton acknowledges
that there is no research on burking in the mid-18th century and he
doesn't cite any documented cases of burking during that era.

There
is no question anatomists of Smellie and Hunter's day got their
cadavers from grave robbers. That's how it was done in those dark and
superstitious days.

Shelton's case boils down to two rather
plausible, but non-dispositive claims: i) relatively few women died in their
9th month of pregnancy or during childbirth to begin with, and, ii)
it's unlikely that ordinary grave robbers would have been able to zero
in on these cases.

Grave robbers tended to exhume corpses
at random, Shelton explains. Or else they targeted the unclaimed bodies
of people who died in poorhouses. But he notes that most of those who
died in poorhouses were old and sick, not otherwise healthy pregnant
women.

Death rates for infectious disease were very high in
mid-18th-century London, but Shelton claims that pregnant women would
have accounted for small percentage of the death toll. As he points
out, they're a subset of the general population and a relatively young
and healthy one at that.

Shelton cites statistics to show that
the childbed death rate in the mid-18th-century was less than 2%. Based
on the birth and death rates and the population of London at the time,
he estimates that there would have been about 200 childbed deaths per
year in the city. (Childbed death includes fatalities during labor and during the first few days postpartum.)

Shelton argues that women who died in their 9th month of
pregnancy would have been rarer still. He speculates that very
pregnant cadavers would have been extremely
rare because a significant percentage women who suffered lethal
illnesses or accidents in their 9th month would have miscarried before
they died.

Even at their most productive, the two doctors
were only seeing about five of their target subjects a year, on
average. Five out of 200 doesn't seem that incredible.

The
author also maintains that it would have been very difficult for grave
robbers to find these rare specimens: Death notices were rarely
published in those days and corpses usually went directly from home to
the graveyard without a detour through a funeral home or some other
central location that thieves could monitor.

Personally, if I were an 18th-century anatomist who needed a steady supply of "special" cadavers, I'd start bribing
vicars. If you pay for the new church roof, I'm sure it's amazing what you
can find out about who's buried where.

So,
the paper gives us good reason to doubt that Smellie and Hunter got all
their cadavers through the standard grave-robbing channels. But that's
hardly proof that the two men commissioned mass murder for hire.

Smellie
and Hunter were famous obstetricians. They worked with pregnant and
birthing women. In an era where most childbirth was handled at home,
they probably served a disproportionately sick patient population.

Let's
not forget that primitive obstetrics was really dangerous--no doubt in
part because because science was still sketchy on pregnant female
anatomy. If anyone was well-situated to tip off grave robbers about
dead pregnant women, or take liberties with their corpses, it would
have been 18th-century obstetricians.

As the author points out,
Smellie and Hunter were rich and well-connected men. He implies that
they could have gotten away with murder. On the other hand, if they
could have gotten away with murder, they presumably had enough
privilege to get what they wanted by less drastic, if socially
unacceptable means.

Shelton claims the following passage,
written in 1818, is a smoking gun. The author was describing a plate in
Smellie's atlas that features twins:

“Dr MacKenzie
being then an assistant to the late Dr Smellie, the procuring and
dissecting this woman without Dr Smellie’s knowledge, was the cause of
a separation between them, for the leading steps to such a discovery
could not be kept a secret."

Smellie died in 1763
and 55 years later, some guy claimed that an associate of Smellie's
obtained the corpse by unspecified (but presumably sketchy) means without Smellie's knowledge. This is supposed to be a smoking gun? Really?

Shelton
gives us no reason to assume that Smellie and Hunter were monsters. Why
immediately jump to the conclusion that they were murderers? There have
been killers in the name of science and medicine, but they've always
been a tiny minority among scientists and for that matter, a very small
subset of murderers. Shelton's wild allegation seems absurd unless you
buy into some nasty stereotypes about doctors and scientists.

He
makes no attempt to rule out less brutal schemes by which they might
have improved their odds relative to common grave-robbers. Could they
have performed unauthorized autopsies on pregnant patients who died of
natural causes? Bribed the families of the deceased? Stolen the bodies
of their own indigent patients? If a body was returned to the family
with an incision in the abdomen,
the obstetricians could always claim it was a cesarean section.

Were
all their subjects even dead? Presumably they could have learned from
examining and treating live women. It's a mundane possibility, but
who's to say these guys didn't exaggerate the number of corpses they
actually looked at? Academic dishonesty is more common than murder.

Obviously,
I'm speculating here, but so is Shelton. He makes probabilistic
arguments, so I'll make one too: If same end can be achieved through
subterfuge or serial murder, most people will opt for subterfuge. Dead
pregnant women are rare, but mass murderers are rarer still. Of course,
tall tales of body snatchers, natural and supernatural, are as common
as dirt.

Shelton is right to question how these doctors got
their cadavers, but he simply does not have enough evidence to conclude
that these pioneers of modern obstetrics killed more women than Jack
the Ripper. This paper is just going to give the science-bashers
unearned ammunition.

September 11, 2009

In the wake of the guard scandal at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, a security contractor explains in strikingly frank terms why these large private security contracts in war zones are so predictably mismanaged:

The main reason why managing these contracts is so difficult is that it is impossible to stay ahead of the stupidity curve your men will generate. There is no way to anticipate it because some of these guys do the most unbelievably stupid things sober; add alcohol and the potential for Darwin Award level stupidity goes up exponentially. In the military I knew my Marines well because we spent so much time together – often in prolonged field exercises. Your average young enlisted Marine has the ability to do stupid things too but they fall into an easily anticipated set of behaviors which savvy leadership can recognize and at times circumvent. Not true with contractors – some of stories I have heard are amazing.

Lynch puts his finger on a structural problem with private security contractors. His Marines weren't necessarily smarter or saner than his contractors, but at least in the Marine Corps he wasn't dealing with a shifting cast of free agents drifting from job to job.

September 05, 2009

Michael Kinsley will never live down his latest column, a rant against fact checking:

"Fact checking" is a tradition of some publications, mainly magazines,
in which one set of employees, called fact checkers, is called upon to
reconfirm every fact in an article by another set of employees, called
writers, generally by finding these facts in newspapers, which don't
have fact checkers. During a blameless journalistic career, in which I
have sometimes had occasion to mock this practice, I have always
resisted criticism from colleagues that my real problem is with the
facts themselves. But I'm beginning to think they may be right. Who can
take facts seriously after reading the daily "Corrections"
column in the New York Times? Although the purpose of this column is to
demonstrate the Times's rectitude about taking facts seriously, the
facts it corrects are generally so bizarre or trivial and its tone so
schoolmarmish that the effect is to make the whole pursuit of factual
accuracy seem ridiculous. [WaPo]

Kinsley proceeds to list several minor errors that recently triggered Times corrections. These include misidentifying the brother of the president of Ecuador, Patricio Fabricio Correa, as "Fabricio Patricio Correa," and referring to the long-distance phone service Voxox as "Vovox."

Of all the bizarre things to complain about... The problem isn't stupid corrections, it's the stupid mistakes that need correcting. Better fact checking could have prevented those errors. (Maybe a fact checker would have caught my error, above.)

Kinsley continues:

The fad for elaborate and abject corrections, and factual accuracy in
general, is based on the misperception that when people complain about
the media getting it all wrong, what bothers them is that the newspaper
identified the mountain inside Denali National Park as Mount Denali (as
it is "referred to by many,"
the Times defensively put it the other day) and not by its official
name of Mount McKinley, which "has not been officially changed." [emphasis added]

I'm speechless. Does Kinsley really think that concern for factual accuracy is a fad? Does he realize that he's handed his critics a stick to beat him, and anyone who cites his work?

The Times is scrupulous about these details because it aspires to be the newspaper of record. The paper doesn't always live up to its own high standards, but at least it has a policy of publicly correcting itself when it falls short.

Rigorous fact checking is a way that a wealthy institution like the Times distinguishes its product in a competitive media market. Few smaller outlets can afford multiple layers of quality control. No matter how carefully a writer checks her own work, it's no substitute for the scrutiny of a trained professional editor. Because, by definition, you don't see the mistakes you don't see. The Times' attention to detail is a true public service because those of us who lack copy editors can check names and dates against the Times with relative confidence.

Narrow factual accuracy isn't sufficient for high quality journalism, but it's still necessary.

July 18, 2009

I had all kinds of ideas for things I wanted to write before I left, but between last-minute packing and phone calls from friends and family, it didn't happen. So I'll just say a few things quickly.

As I said before, one of the things that led me to start blogging in the first place was the fact that I thought the country had gone crazy, and one of the things that particularly bothered me was the sheer level of invective and hatred that people seemed to feel comfortable directing at one another. I hated this, not just in itself, but because I thought: this harms us all.

A democracy is essentially about determining the course of our nation together. To do that, it helps a lot to have a good citizenry. A good citizenry is informed, serious about things that are worth taking seriously, and not liable to be led off course by demagogues. (Everyone doesn't have to be like this, but you need a critical mass of people who are.) But I've always thought that a good citizenry is also composed of people who assume, until proven wrong, that many of the people who disagree with them are acting in good faith.

This matters for policy: you're unlikely to choose sound policies if you assume that anyone who disagrees with you is a depraved, corrupt imbecile. It's hard to learn anything from people you have completely written off. But it's also corrosive to any kind of community or dialogue to assume the worst about large numbers of people you've never met. It makes you less willing to try to take their problems seriously, and to try to figure out how they might be solved, or to try to understand what's driving them.

I hate it when people do this to me. I never wanted to do it to them.

The thing is, it's hard to see how to try to help create a better citizenry. It's not something that can be accomplished by enacting a policy, the way covering the uninsured is. It's a matter of individual moral choices, and as far as I can see, the only way in which we can have a better citizenry is to make the best choices we can, and to try to help other people when it's in our power to do so. I once had a friend who decided that she would research all the down-ticket offices, candidates for judgeships, etc. -- the races we all vote on without having a clue who we're voting for -- and distribute the information she found to anyone who wanted it. She was helping out in the way I have in mind.

When I started blogging, I thought: with all the craziness and vitriol that's flying around, it's worth at least trying to do something like that. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to be informed, by covering stories that weren't being covered, and by always linking to my primary sources, so that only one of us had to spend time figuring out how to find some bill or GAO report, for instance; and to fact-check claims that struck me as dubious, and that were being accepted.

But I also wanted to try, if at all possible, to treat people, and most especially my political opponents, with respect, except where respect had been clearly forfeited. (Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, I'm thinking of you.) Because, as I said, I think it's just corrosive to democracy if people are not willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to one another. Besides, it's uncharitable and wrong, and besides that, perhaps some people would survive in a world in which no one was ever more generous to them than they deserve, but I am quite sure that I would not.

That was one of the things I wanted to try to do. I wasn't particularly confident that I'd succeed at all, but I thought: the least I can do is try. It might be a complete failure. It might be that the idea of me trying to do this is just laughable, and that if I had the self-awareness God gave an oyster, I'd be rolling on the floor laughing. Still, I thought, if it doesn't work, the fault will probably be mine, and I'll learn something. (One thing about blogging: you have to be willing to regard criticism as a learning experience, because your shortcomings, including the ones you don't know about and will be mortified to discover, are always in plain view.)

I think that democracy, like any kind of community, takes effort. It needs to be maintained. People need to work at it. And the last five years have made me realize, yet again, that even when things seem really bad, they are not hopeless. There is always something you can do. Even when you're not expecting it, you'll get an email from Moe Lane asking: would you like to join our blog?

All you can do is try. And as my grandmother used to say to us: it is not worthy of humanity to give up.

***

I also want to thank everyone who commented on the various goodbye threads at ObWi, the Monthly, and elsewhere, my wonderful co-bloggers, and all the people who have commented over the years. It means more to me than I can tell you. But I've always felt that I got much more than I gave from the communities at both blogs, and I'm more grateful than I can say.

July 13, 2009

First, I'm going to Rwanda this weekend, on vacation. I'm looking forward to it immensely, especially since I discovered that the Bare-Faced Go-Away Bird, which topped my list of Best Bird Names Ever nearly five years ago, lives there. (And did you know that the name 'Watusi' comes from the Tutsi? I didn't.) If anyone has any great suggestions for things I might not think to do, etc., please let me know.

Second, I'm taking this opportunity to retire from blogging. I'll be here through Friday, but after that, I won't. (I'll still hang out in comments, though, after I get back.) I'm not sure it would be possible for me to stop if I weren't going off to central Africa without my computer, but since I am, I will.

The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane. It wasn't just the insane policies, although that was part of it. It was the sheer level of invective: the way that people who held what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable views, e.g. that invading Iraq might not be such a smart move, were routinely being described as al Qaeda sympathizers who hated America and all it stood for and wanted us all to die.

I thought: we've gone mad. And I have to do something -- not because I thought that I personally could have any appreciable effect on this, but because it felt like what Katherine called an all hands on deck moment. I had heard about times like this in the past -- the McCarthy era, for instance -- though I had never expected to live through one. Nonetheless, I was. And I had to try to do something, however insignificant.

But what? I had no idea. And I kept on having no idea for a while. I worked my heart out for Wes Clark, since I thought that he would be our strongest candidate in 2004. I talked to random people. It obviously wasn't enough, but it was all I could think of.

Then, in 2004, I was asked to join Obsidian Wings. It was an honor: at the time, ObWi was, for my money, the best blog that really tried to create a dialogue between liberals and conservatives. And that was what I really wanted to do: to listen to people I disagreed with, to engage with them, and to try to show that it was possible to care deeply about politics without hating your opponents. Being civil doesn't mean you're lukewarm, and being committed to your principles doesn't mean you have to be hateful. Being asked to write for the Washington Monthly was a further honor, and one that I never expected.

That said, it seems to me that the madness is over. There are lots of people I disagree with, and lots of things I really care about, and even some people who seem to me to have misplaced their sanity, but the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more. Also, it has been nearly five years since I started. And so it seems to me that it's time for me to turn back into a pumpkin and twelve white mice.

It has been wonderful, though. I've had the best co-bloggers I can imagine, both at ObWi and at the Monthly, and I've learned an enormous amount from all the commenters. This is one of the things I love most about blogging: I put something up, and suddenly all these wonderful, smart, and articulate people whom I've never met pop up and start saying interesting things about it. It's a gift for which I will always be grateful.

"President Obama is facing new pressure to reverse himself and to ramp up investigations into the Bush-era security programs, despite the political risks.

Leading Democrats on Sunday demanded investigations of how a highly classified counterterrorism program was kept secret from the Congressional leadership on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Fox News Sunday called it a “big problem.” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, on “This Week” on ABC, agreed that the secrecy “could be illegal” and demanded an inquiry.

Mr. Obama said this weekend that he had asked his staff members to review the mass killing of prisoners in Afghanistan by local forces allied with the United States as it toppled the Taliban regime there. The New York Times reported Saturday that the Bush administration had blocked investigations of the matter.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is also close to assigning a prosecutor to look into whether prisoners in the campaign against terrorism were tortured, officials disclosed on Saturday.

And after a report from five inspectors general about the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping said on Friday that there had been a number of undisclosed surveillance programs during the Bush years, Democrats sought more information."

Let me add my own little millibar to that pressure. All of these things deserve to be investigated. This is not a matter of focussing on the past at the expense of the future. We will not have the future we want if government officials can break the law with impunity, safe in the knowledge that no future administration will be willing to take the political heat and investigate them.

Since anyone who is reading this probably knows what I think about these questions, I'd like to focus instead on this:

"Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC that despite his dismay at the Central Intelligence Agency’s past interrogation methods, including waterboarding, he opposed a criminal inquiry into torture, which he said would “harm our image throughout the world.”"

I think that is exactly wrong. People around the world are not under any illusions about whether or not we tortured people. They know that we did, and that fact has already, and rightly, done enormous damage to our image.

What they don't know is whether we are prepared to do anything about it. Do we just lecture other people about their shortcomings, or are we ready to face up to our own? Most of the people I've met abroad assume that we will do nothing. They don't think this because of any particular dislike of the United States; they just assume that that is the way things work. If we do not hold anyone to account for any of the crimes that were committed under the last administration, they will not be surprised.

If we do hold people to account, on the other hand, that will make an impression.

In thinking about this, I am reminded of conversations I had when I was in Pakistan. My first trip there was in 2007, when the campaigns were just kicking into gear. People asked who I supported; I said Obama. They asked: but can he possibly win? I said that while I was reluctant to judge, I thought that he could.

The most common reaction -- not uniform, but common -- was a combination of several things. On the one hand, I was American and they were not, so the people I talked to naturally assumed that I probably had a better grasp of US politics than they did. Besides, I was their guest, and they were wonderfully polite. On the other hand, however, they found the idea that Barack Obama -- an African-American who did not come from a privileged background, whose father was from a Kenyan village -- could possibly be elected President literally unbelievable.

It was fascinating to watch them trying to reconcile these conflicting impulses: I was talking about a country I lived in, which most of them had never been to, and I was not obviously insane, but I was saying something that could not possibly be true. And, as best I could tell, there were two reasons why it couldn't be true: first, whoever the Pakistani analog of Barack Obama might be, that person would never be elected President in Pakistan, and second, they had been disappointed in America's track record in living up to its ideals, and so were not inclined to believe that it would do so this time.

The last time I went, Barack Obama had secured the nomination. People in Pakistan were astonished, but they were also really inspired. And I don't think that this was mainly about Obama's policies. It was about us living up to our ideals: about the idea that in America, anyone really can grow up to be President, and about the idea that enough of us had managed to look past our long history of slavery and discrimination and bigotry that we might elect Barack Obama President.

It gave people hope: the hope that cynics are not always right, and that the fix is not always in.

If we're interested in our image abroad, we could do a lot worse than simply deciding to live up to our ideals: for instance, the rule of law. It's the right thing to do, but it's also the smart thing.

July 06, 2009

Queen Emily, who is guestblogging at Feministe, hates forms. Why? Because while "my birth certificate says I am male, my gender presentation is female. They do not match. Until I can afford expensive genital surgery, I cannot change the marker on my birth certificate." If you've never had to think about exactly how much trouble this can cause, consider yourself lucky:

"A small example: Imagine you went to the hospital, with stroke-like symptoms (it was later found to be "complicated migraines"). Because you want to actually be treated, you do not out yourself as transsexual. When the triage nurse filled in the forms, he puts female, and you leave it there. (...)

Fast forward to a week later, and I'm (sorry, you) at a neurology department to see a specialist to organize an MRI, when one of the reception people comes out to see you and starts screaming that you're a GODDAMN LIAR because your forms say I'm female but some quirk of the computer system has found your birthdate and surname and pinged up an old treatment from when you were six. Because of this, they decide that your name isn't real either, and it takes three trips to different departments with your changed birth certificate (changed in name but not in sex). In the end, they put a post-it on your file, with your name, your legal bloody name, in quotation marks like it’s a f*cking nickname. And these are the people who are supposed to help you.

Now imagine what happens in an emergency situation.

Imagine you're me, six months before this, and you're young and naive and full of stupid, figuring that putting M will help them you treat you better (ha!), checking yourself in to see a doctor because you’re struggling to breathe. And the dude takes one look at your forms and your barely passing self, and refuses to enter the room. He just stands there at the edge, asking you to holler symptoms at him, and you sit there knowing that if you collapse, this man will pause and debate whether to save you or not."

Read the rest. It gets worse. There are customs lines, and traffic stops, at any one of which someone could look at you, look at your driver's license, and decide that you're a fraud, or a freak, or whatever their minds might come up with to explain the anomaly of someone who presents as one gender carrying a driver's license or birth certificate that says something different.

In comments, someone wrote that the local public transportation system requires little M or F stickers on their monthly passes, and that "an acquaintance of mine (a trans woman) was *arrested* because a bus driver, convinced that she was "male" (she had an "F" sticker), called the police."

I'm trying to think of a reason why any bus or subway system needs to specify gender on its monthly passes. I can't think of a single one.

And it's not as though there are ways of avoiding this situation. Even assuming that you live in a state that lets you legally change your gender, that requires gender reassignment surgery, and gender reassignment surgery normally requires, among other things, living as the gender you identify with, completely, for a year. That's a year during which traffic stops, doctor's visits, and the like will be very problematic.

The reason I write about trans issues is that I really can't see how any of this will change until non-trans people really stop and think about things like this. once you do stop to think about it, it's barbaric that doctors and hospitals would be unprepared to deal with trans people, or that whenever you have to tick a little box that says M or F, there's a real possibility that someone will realize that your gender presentation and your ID don't match, and freak out about that. It's even worse that mollifying them, if it's possible at all, will require divulging a whole lot more about the state of your genitalia and the details of your personal life than anyone should ever have to explain to, say, a bus driver or a traffic cop.

June 25, 2009

She was enough of a star that she didn't need to make The Burning Bed, and the kind of star (all-American sex symbol) who might justifiably have wondered what effect it might have on her career. But she made it anyways, and it had an enormous effect of bringing the discussion of domestic violence into the mainstream. A lot of people owe her thanks for that, and other things.

Just to add some music to Seb's post: Michael Jackson was about my age, which means that I remember when he first came to national attention. If you know him more from Thriller, let alone from his later life, it might be hard to imagine just how talented he was; and how beautiful his face was before he started trying to improve on it. This is from when he was around eleven (if you want to skip the dumb intro, start at around 40 seconds):

"From a young age Jackson was physically and mentally abused by his father, enduring incessant rehearsals, whippings and name-calling. Jackson's abuse as a child affected him throughout his grown life. In one altercation -- later recalled by Marlon Jackson -- Joseph held Michael upside down by one leg and "pummeled him over and over again with his hand, hitting him on his back and buttocks". Joseph would often trip up, or push the male children into walls. One night while Jackson was asleep, Joseph climbed into his room through the bedroom window. Wearing a fright mask, he entered the room screaming and shouting. Joseph said he wanted to teach his children not to leave the window open when they went to sleep. For years afterward, Jackson suffered nightmares about being kidnapped from his bedroom.

Jackson first spoke openly about his childhood abuse in a 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey. He said that during his childhood he often cried from loneliness and would sometimes get sick or start to regurgitate upon seeing his father. In Jackson's other high profile interview, Living with Michael Jackson (2003), the singer covered his face with his hand and began crying when talking about his childhood abuse. Jackson recalled that Joseph sat in a chair with a belt in his hand as he and his siblings rehearsed and that "if you didn't do it the right way, he would tear you up, really get you.""

For me, the song that encapsulates Michael Jackson's stranger side is Ben. If you don't know it, give it a listen, bearing in mind that the Ben in question is a homicidal rat.